Bear's Log

I was about ready to go to bed when I figured I would go check on the various portal pages (Google, Yahoo, MSN) to see what was new. Next thing I know I’ve lost an hour. It seems the really smart folks at Yahoo have seriously thrown down the gauntlet towards Google with the release of Yahoo! Pipes.

The interface for the pipe editor simply rocks! I kept having to look at the title bar to make sure I was still in my browser. ok, enough with the gushing - I do see what they are doing with this. They have taken complete advantage of the shift towards a common set of data streams that blogging and the Semantic Web folks have brought about and hooked up the perl based Plagger module to an amazing UI. Plagger is to Perl, what Hep (or even Universal Feed Parser) is to Python, and what Grrdl is to RDF – a sweet set of tools to consume, parse and spit out data.

And now the Yahoo gang have place a some-what user friendly interface on it. This is what a lot of us have been doing with our own tools - creating personal data aggregation streams. The downside I see to this is now Yahoo has/is/will be unleashing thousands of full feed consuming processes at the major sites but without the site-friendly polling schedules.

I can see a lot of the medium to small sites just plain blocking Yahoo! Pipes completely whereas the large sites are already geared up for it but even they may notice if this really takes off. Anywho, enough off-the-cuff ramblings. In the 4 sample pipes I created I was amazed at the fact that it was easy to view the data for each step, see what I wanted to do and then have it just work.

The only glitch I could immediately see was that it was a lot to take in.